In a book a few years ago, I called the worldwide web a "great autonomous linking machine" – a shoutout to the web's most essential characteristic: hyperlinks. Information creators use them to take people to new places. Information consumers use them to traverse the increasingly blurry boundaries of human knowledge. We all benefit.

Linking led to a practice that has come to be called curation and aggregation – the collection of useful pointers by one person for viewing by others. Countless people play this valuable role in my daily media use, on blogs, on Twitter, in email and other ways.

Some do it way better than others. As the New York Times's David Carr noted in a column this week, the Drudge Report has been a longtime online power via its simply designed cornucopia of links. Like it or not (and I don't), the combination of the Drudge site's rightwing politics and mainstream journalists' laziness has helped set the news agenda for years.

Drudge has done much more to poison than enrich American political discourse, but I greatly respect one aspect of work. He simply posts linked headlines, inviting the site user to go elsewhere to read what's being linked to. This isn't a great distance from the Googlenews approach, which is to collect stories about specific themes or events and display a linked headline with a tiny excerpt from the story, typically the first sentence.

Some old media people have persuaded themselves that Google's links are somehow a problem. They plainly don't understand how the web works, but they have an easy way to stop inbound search engine links: tell the search engines not to index them, a request the big search companies gladly honour.

There's a more legitimate issue for traditional media in the way many other kinds of so-called aggregators work. They scour the web for interesting material. Then they write a summary, often a long one, of the original, and post the summary. They usually link to the original, but sometimes they link to a story that itself is a summary of yet another piece. The most effective aggregators deploy all kinds of search engine optimisation techniques to appear high on the list when people do relevant searches.

Long summaries of this sort seem designed to tell enough of the story that it's not necessary to click back to the original. It's legal, but I don't think it's entirely ethical – though I would not want to see any laws prohibiting the practice, because there would surely be collateral damage against other, more honourable, kinds of quoting.

It's almost impossible to avoid these retellings, partly because they attract so many of their own inbound links. That means we end up giving vastly more credit – and "Google juice" – to undeserving people and sites. Here's an example from the Huffington Post, itself one of the more aggressive summary-style aggregators: in February 2011, it summarised (with admirable brevity in this case) a CNN story about a long-ago illegal drug charge against Mitch Daniels when was a student at Princeton University. Problem was, the CNN piece was little more than a summary of a story from the university's student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, which had published the original in-depth piece. The Huffington Post's link to the CNN story was, in a word, lazy.

Such laziness seems ingrained in today's web curation, and it's especially prevalent on sites like Twitter and Facebook, where people are racing to post links to current events and interesting material. The urge to send our audiences to valuable new places is a great one, but we need to do it in a more thoughtful way that rewards the people who deserve the attention.

So, the next time you link to something, check it out a bit more. If it's just a summary of someone else's original reporting or analysis, take the extra few seconds to link to the original. Let's all raise our linking standards, and give credit where it's genuinely due.